


the river run dry

by sazzafraz



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M, Violence, and some other stuff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-23
Updated: 2012-09-27
Packaged: 2017-11-12 17:29:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 6
Words: 16,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/493845
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sazzafraz/pseuds/sazzafraz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles got teeth and claws and the Hale family legacy. Scott got hands to build, eyes to see and the knowledge that comes with it. ( In which Stiles is the werewolf, everything goes horribly wrong and heroism is not as advertised.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

\--

Here’s how this starts-

Stiles gets bitten by a werewolf in the forest with his hands on a dead body.

Stiles drops from his roof in his front yard.

Stiles punches him in the arm until he signs up for lacrosse.

Stiles holds his hand as his fathers’ car leaves a long smooth smoke trail out of his life.

Stiles throws paste at his head when Scott is five.

Basically, this story starts because Stiles is a storm of mildly irritating, well meaning intentions, and Scott is an ocean that buoys him.

\--

‘Basically,’ Stiles says, ‘lycanthropy.’

‘Is it contagious?’ Scott asks with hands still curled over the lacrosse stick. Stiles is sitting on Scotts’ bed with his hands -claws, putting tiny holes in the duvet. He smiles.

‘Only if we get freaky.’

\--

In the first story, though, the child is taken from his home by the wolves. Made into a changeling child by the moon and ripped apart at the seams, stuffed full again with magic and teeth and blood.

The child dies, the pack survives, wolves hunt, men die.

It happens as it does for a reason.

\--

The reason is lies; obviously.

But really, who are _they_ to know that.

\--

‘You can’t.’ Scott says, holding the bat in a loose fist. He’s got his fingers on weapons all the time now it seems.

‘Why not?’ Stiles eyes are golden. Lit all the way up from the blood on his teeth. From Lydia’s throat. From Peters hand pressed against the back of Stiles’ head.

‘Why not, Scott?’ Peter says.

\--

A woman wraps herself in silver to keep the teeth out. A woman rises from the burned ruins to lead. A woman is born an archer born a warrior born a queen.

A man is born a solider is born a sacrifice is born a loose end.

A man is turned.

\--

‘What are you gonna burn tonight, son?’ Kate asks with sincerity. ‘My brothers dead now, you know. By your brothers _little furred hand_. Can I come too?’

‘No.’ Scott says. He’s not dead, Scott thinks, not yet. ‘This is kind of your fault, _you_ know.’

‘No. I don’t know.’ She says sadly, a knife doubling between her fingers. Allison is outside, bow ready, waiting for confirmation. This is a bad play but it’s all he has.

His hands tremble. There’s a line. He thinks there’s still one. God he hopes there is. ‘Do you think they’d burn you, too?’

She shrugs and her hair catches the light, earthy and new and _bright, bright, bright_ , ‘We’ll never know.’

He says _now_ into the microphone and ‘I guess not’ to the world and the rapidly thinning line.

\--

Derek is on the floor. He is hurt. Scott has his flesh on his finger and no weapons to speak of.

‘You can’t stop him.’ Someone says. ‘You can’t save them.’

Scott wipes the sweat off his face, the red paints a film across his eyes, ‘I have to try.’

‘We could help.’

He blinks. Dereks life slips through his hands like thread; silver thread twisting with the gold still shining from Kate’s bad head. A man born a wolf killed by a woman with a mouth full of silver. Silver and gold runs through Scott McCalls’ hands and Kate Argent and Derek Hale will die just as star crossed and double crossed as they intended and more will die for _no fucking reason at all_.

‘Yes.'

Wolfsbane ignites.

\--

Here’s how it starts-

‘A dead body?’

‘No, a body of water, dumbass. Yes! A dead body!’

Scott shrugs and drops his bat and goes in his red jacket through the trees. There are dead leaves underfoot. There is no noise. Stiles screams and Scott screams and only one of them is _‘lycanthropy, basically.’_

Stiles has more teeth and Scott has glasses to cover the blindness leading to the _sight._

\--

Here’s how it starts-

_Two brothers went into the dark one night and neither of them came back._

Basically; _war_.

There it is, now you know.

\--


	2. Chapter 2

It’s a Thursday and on Thursdays Scott presses together a few sheets of pastry thin paper marked with codes in a long lost rune set. He folds it into a neat paper crane and writes ‘ _For Chris’_ on the side. Inside there are no actual codes, Peter has long since figured out there purpose after all, just messages from his family and assurances from Scott. There is a tiny Arrow shooting through a moon. A symbol for Allison.

The drop off happens three times a week in the shadiest corner of town. Scott arrives thirteen minutes before Stiles. Sometimes they stare at each other across the street. Stiles leaning against the wall, yellow eyes and a dark jacket; Scott with the bat at his side, palm tattoos obvious and threatening, green tinted glasses on his face. Stiles moves first, around the corner to the one diner in town that refuses to be run out by the wolves. Scott moves second to the bright yellow bin at the corner of the street.

Today it’s bright outside. Today there are people about. Scott arrives six minutes earlier than usual. He doesn’t want to see Stiles. He’d like to pretend that his best friend isn’t here to betray him. The paper crane goes into the bin five minutes early. One yellow tipped wing sticking out.  He draws out a symbol on the side of the bin, presses his blood in and feels the tattoos on his skin itch.

‘Stiles,’ he says without turning. The ink in his skin is literally rising to the surface, forming wave after wave of silver and wolfsbane. He bites his lip and pushes it back.

‘Remember when I could sneak up on you?’ Stiles says, ‘I miss that.’

Scott turns and finds Stiles bare centimetres from his face. His eyes are bright and golden, thin stress lines at the corner. This is aging him as much as it is Scott. There are fewer freckles, fewer every time as the lycanthropy takes away spots and scars. If he breathes in-

No.

Stiles moves his hand into the bin and holds up the crane.

‘It’s a crane.’ Scott says flatly. Stiles smirks a little and makes a show of breathing in deeper before he steps back. From the outside Stiles looks similar to a year ago. Or maybe Scott would just recognise him no matter what. He’s the same height, filled out and comfortable. His cheekbones are a little higher. He looks harmless as long as he doesn’t open his mouth.

‘He has a couple dozen of these now,’ Stiles’ hands turn the crane over and over, touching every bit of the paper,  ‘what do they mean?’

Scott raises an eyebrow, ‘The point is that _you_ don’t know.’

He means to leave with that. One smart one liner for all the infuriatingly cryptic ones Stiles leaves on his doorstep. Clues that mean _fuck all_ in the long run. He turns away with his shoulder deliberately showing the line of his back. Stiles touches the back of his neck and twists around until he’s standing in front of him again. The crane is gone, presumably into his jacket, and Stiles hand briefly touches Scotts face before finding its place behind Stiles back.

‘He burns them,’ Stiles says conversationally, ‘Peter makes him.’

You _asshole_.

‘Peter, huh.’ He really doesn’t believe that. Might have six months ago but if Stiles isn't  outright calling the shots he’s pretty close to.

Stiles hums to himself. ‘Come on, there’s an all you can eat around the corner.’

Scott curls his hands into fists. They _do not_ do this.

Stiles takes it wrong, as he is wont to do, ‘It’s our anniversary Scott. The annual celebration of two dumbass kids wandering right into the clutches of the big bad wolf. I’m not gonna let anyone hurt you today.’

That’s laughable really. Nothing’s been able to hurt him in a long while. ‘No-ones going to hurt me no matter what you say.’

Stiles smiles, rolls his shoulders and makes an exuberant gesture.

‘So? Curly fries? Burgers with too much meat? Inappropriate jokes about too much meat?’

‘Sure,’ Scott says, ‘why not.’

\--

A year ago this wouldn’t have been weird.

Of course, a year ago Laura and Derek Hale were firmly among the living, Stiles wasn’t _werewolf inclined,_ Scott couldn’t see the future, Alison didn’t know his name, the Argents could at least pretend at happy families, Peter freakin’ Hale was pretending to be in a coma and Lydia-

Well,

_Lydia,_

It’s not a year ago, though, and Scott has to be careful to not get sauce or grime on his tattoos.

‘Well,’ Stiles says around the fries in his mouth, ‘look at the food.’

There’s a lot of it and it’s fried and if wishes were fishes and Scott had gone left in the woods, if things had gone differently, if Stiles had been the one to run into his father maybe he’d just be getting dinner with a friend. Maybe in the universe next door Scott wouldn’t be pulling out thin mesh gloves to cover his hands to make sure his only viable plan of defence without his bat doesn’t short out, say, fighting his evil overlord werewolf best friend _._ If all the wishes in the world were fishes.

Stiles speaks first. ‘Why were you here early?’

‘Why were you?’

‘Scott, come on, you can tell me.’

He really can’t.

Stiles tries a different tactic. ‘How’s Allison?’

‘Not talking to me, but you knew that.’

‘Yeah.’ And that seems the end of it.

They eat in silence, the diner blowing hot and cold with people exiting and entering. Scott eats a burger then some fries and then another burger and then drinks Stiles vanilla milkshake because he thinks he can get away with it. Stiles looks up and frowns a little, mustard sauce managing something sinister at the corners of his mouth.

‘I’m gonna ask again.’ Stiles warns.

‘I’m gonna say no.’

‘And that’s alright, but I’m going to ask again.’ Stiles leg starts tapping out a fast tempo between the booth and the floor. ‘You have to say yes sometime.’

Scott doesn’t say anything.

His legs slide up and between Scotts calves. Scott keeps his legs together until the rhythm forces them open. ‘It’ll fix your eyes.’

‘Nothing will let me see again.’

Up the leg goes, now between his knees and resting on the edge of the seat, the top of his foot tipping over and pressing lightly against the inside of his thigh. Along the seam of his jeans. Scott tenses.

‘ _You give up this poisonous dream.’_ Scott whispers, gloved hand pressing against Stiles ankle, up across his Achilles. Stiles is tucked mostly under the table now. __

 _‘You come home.’_ Stiles finishes, pulling his foot back and flicking out his wallet. Stiles pays. He usually does.

‘I’ll see you on Thursday.’

And if Scott feels a feather light weight on his forehead, the indentation of lips, he says nothing.

He waits five, ten, fifteen minutes before he leaves.

 --

_the dreams burn him down. the sight drowns him. everything blanks out._

_everything but his brother ends and the moon chokes them both._

_they drown_

_they drown_

_they are eaten alive_

_\--_

Scott opens his eyes again.

\--

Isaac is at the entrance to the abandoned motel they’ve been using as a base since Peter smoked them out of their houses three months ago. His face is pinched up into bad news. Scott nods at him and enters through the service entrance to avoid setting off the boundary spells around the front gate. He goes through the managers section picking up his bat on the way. The familiar weight hums and sighs in his fingers. The connection between the silver and wolfsbane in his skin and the writing on the bat kicking up. The managers section smells like dead meat. Deaton thinks most magic this archaic and this deadly smells like dead something. Lydia said she liked it, he doesn’t put much stock in that, she’s _Lydia._ The entrance is heavily fortified against wolves but not against much else, Deaton had said. _Much else_ has a habit of wandering in. Hence Isaac leaning against the door on the other side and Erica on the roof sunbathing. Erica waves and blows kisses. Scott mocks grabbing one and pressing it to his cheek. It’s the little things.

‘Deaton and Morrell are here.’ Isaac says.

‘Did they say why?’

‘They need your hands.’

‘Yeah, okay, just let me go talk to my-’

‘She’s not here. Went with the Sheriff this morning.’

Scott sighs, ‘right, then. Victoria?’

‘With her mother.’

What he thinks of that must flash across his face because Isaac smiles and nods as he turns back to guarding the gate.

The motel is two storeys with the bottom half hollowed out and half renovated into long open rooms and the second storey cut into neat apartment blocks. There’s an inner courtyard and a defunct pool with that they dug out until it was deep enough to chain up and throw the wolves in when they couldn’t control themselves. There’s a bad sex joke in there, he knows. Scott has the room furthest inside the motel, number 26. As they found out their first full moon here, Stiles is willing to run over a lot to get what he wants. The wards give him a decent amount of immediate security. His hands and his bat can handle the rest. Deaton and Morrell are sitting on a pair of floral patterned garden chairs outside his door. Morrell sipping a cup of coffee and Deaton with his hands clasped in his lap.

He rubs his face with the palm of his hand. ‘So?’

‘We need to talk to Lydia.’ Morrell says.

‘Please.’ Deaton adds.

‘You can go yourselves.’ He rests the bat against the wall and steps away from it. Morrell puts down her coffee.

‘Lydia has made it quite clear that any further interference from us will be met with swift and disproportionate violence.’ Morrell picks her coffee up again and blows across it. His fingers twitch for the bat.

Deaton smiles. ‘Her words not ours.’

‘And, Mr McCall, everybody likes you.’   

If he says no Morrell will mutter a few quiet words and the city will shake. If he says no Deaton will sigh and produce an ultimatum he can’t get out of. Everyone he knows is dangerous and sometimes it hurts to think about that.

‘We’ll go in a couple of hours. She doesn’t like daytime visits.’ Scott hesitates, ‘There’s some snacks downstairs.’

‘In a couple of hours then.’

His room is separated into a nest of blankets he sleeps in when he isn’t somewhere else and papers in various languages of varying importance. The table holds six cups and medical equipment, pill boxes and takeout stacked three high. His guitar and lacrosse stick lie across a lonely chair in the corner. There are four jars of silver ink on the kitchenette and 23 different strands of wolfsbane drying out over the little stove. He has three pairs of pants and at least two of Allisons’ shirts in a pile by the bathroom. She hasn’t been back in days either.

He toes off his shoes and falls into the muddle of blankets and pillows. He sleeps. He doesn’t see anything.

\--

Lydia lives in the darkest corner of the forest in a house you can only see out of the corner of your eye. He knows how to find it because it was her hands that put the silver in him. He’d be able to find her anywhere now. Neither like how comfortable they are with that idea. When he finds her she is outside with a glass of amber liquid. She nods at him and continues speaking to the undergrowth in strident tones. Something is not doing what it should be. Lydia is wearing a green dress that blends with the forest, her hair is twisted up and fraying out of an old bun. The scars from when Peter attacked her are stark and obvious against her skin. She’s not beautiful in the same way she used to be. There’s a dimension of viciousness that was only implied before. He puts the bat in its harness over his shoulder.

‘I brought visitors.’ He says.

She rolls her big eyes, made larger by the permanent rings around them and the thin, thin golden band around the irises, ‘I know, it’s my forest.’

He holds up a bag, ‘I brought some stuff for Derek too.’

When she walks over he hears no noise, like the earth is moving instead of her. She takes the bag and looks at the contents, nodding and touching things, ‘He’s out back talking to Laura again. Don’t scare her off this time with your stomping. She’s no fun to call up and you would not believe the pouting I get when she’s gone.’

The rustle of leaves and boots and he can almost feel Deaton edge up behind him. Morrell follows a second later. She’s a lighter presence, like lightning where Deaton’s heavy rolling thunder.

Lydia huffs and throws him an exasperated look, ‘Deaton and Morrell, speaking of no fun...’

He shrugs and goes into the house. From the front room to the backroom, the walls are lined with bottles. Some filled and some empty. There is a bowl of teeth and a string of blue pearls inside a pentagram in the living room. He steps around that one carefully. The house smells like it’s been swallowed by the earth. Water twists on the floor of her kitchen into algae blue pond edged with Georgia red dust. He can make out fingers touching the surface from underneath, lilies spilling out from under fingernails. He imagines it would be hard for Derek to stand breathing here, let along living. Being how he is and surrounded by a living coffin all the time. Then again, Derek lived in the wreck his family burnt alive in. Maybe he’s morbid enough to find it funny.

He stops onto the back porch and into another section of the forest entirely. He recognises it. Leave it to Derek to find a way to entomb himself further in his families charred up misery. The Hale house is half restored and sparkling with wellness. Six weeks ago Stiles called an impromptu truce when they figured out no one could get near the Hale property anymore. It drove Peter crazy. Another little _fuck you_ from Lydia, then. If he’d been more vindictive, more like Stiles than he already is, he’d call Peter right now and tell him.

He’s not cruel like Peter, not petty like Stiles can be, and the first thing he really notices is Derek holding a hammer and squinting at him. Paint is in his hair and he’s looking as peaceful as he ever seems to get. They’d ruin it for him, again, and maybe all Derek really deserves at this point is to be left alone with his ghosts and his paintbrush.

Derek inclines his head at him, ‘Scott.’

‘Derek. You can’t come into town again.’

Derek obviously flinches and it must be good for him to be here if he actually looks like he has feelings.

‘I needed to make sure she was dead dead and not me dead.’

Derek dead is a botched combination of Lydia’s fury and Scott’s fear and a whole lot of convenient magic. Derek is Lydia’s will and his wolf, shoved into the same relative shape as he was when human. Scott could find Lydia wherever she decided to go. Wherever she _would_ have gone if it hadn’t been for Derek wound as close to her as her own hands and Derek always half buried in this forest. Lydia and Derek are the flip sides of the same coin now and her rage when all of Kate was revealed was horrifying.  Kate is as dead as Scott can make her. She’s buried and burned and salted and layered with every damning seal and herb he knows. Buried in the centre of Lydia’s domain just in case. Derek doesn’t know they’ve done it. They won’t tell him.

Scott waves the bag, ‘I know, just, we’re here for you, you know? Run it by me next time. You nearly got killed and I don’t like owing Stiles like this.’ Derek frowns spectacularly with almost childlike intensity ‘He’s not that bad.’ Scott says quietly, he is _forever_ reminding people that Stiles is not actually Satan artfully rearranged.

‘Yeah, sure.’ Derek says. He pauses and looks considering, ‘Do you ever think about what it would have been like if it had been you?’

‘I try not to.’ He says honestly.

‘Lydia wants to talk to you. She says I should try-’ he stops and moves his hands like he’s suddenly discovered them, ‘will you come out on the full moon. With me.’

Scott frowns and tries to backtrack how they came to this point, ‘Are you asking me out on a date?’

Derek looks pained. ‘Scott. I meant _all of you._ ’

‘Oh.’ All of his _wolves_ , ‘You didn’t specify. Sure.’

Derek huffs, ‘Thank you.’

He drops the bag and goes back inside. The hands in the pond have their palms open and waiting. He sees one actually crook its finger at him.

‘Ah,’ Lydia says, admonishing the hand with a finger of her own, ‘we _like_ him.’

He smiles weakly, ‘What do you need?’

‘Your eyes need to be done again.’

Scott sighs and gives her his hand. She leads him to a small orange room that’s always full of 2pm sunshine on a Saturday in autumn. In the room is a green armchair. It’s meant to put you at ease and would succeed if it weren’t for the complete lack of shadow or darkness. Lydia calls it the recovery room. Scott calls it creepy.

Lydia throws him into the chair and gives him a look that’s clearly disappointed.

‘You’re not shaving.’

‘I like the scruff.’

‘You look like Derek.’

‘Derek looks perfectly handsome.’

She rolls her eyes and leaves. The room is busy sounding like bird calls and warmth. He relaxes before he catches himself and sits up straight again.

Lydia treads softly back in, pearls and teeth and a bottle full of dye the exact colour of his eyes tucked into a bowl under her arm, ‘You’re safe here.’

‘I’m not sure I’m safe anywhere.’

‘Here,’ she taps him on the nose, ‘here you are safe and I will stand for nothing less. I lost Jackson and my family and Allison and everything else but I will not lose you. Now lean back.’

He does. Her hands are cold when she opens his eyes and uses a strand of her own hair to dab the colour onto his irises, disguising the blank stare underneath. Three people know he’s blind and he’d like to keep it that way.

‘I can’t do this for him,’ she mutters, wiping the excess into the bowl, ‘the colour’s always wrong. It doesn’t flash right.’

She wants him to have some magic. Pull out a paper the right shade so Derek can have as much of himself back as possible. He says instead, ‘maybe you’re both fine the way you are.’

‘I hate you some days.’ Which means he’s right and the dye is going to burn all the way home.

She finishes the job by painting a symbol at the corner of his eyes. Her hands move along pressure points and she checks his tattoos (‘What the hell are you doing? Turbo charging these things?’) before she throws him out with, ‘now go have Derek throw some dirt at your face.’

He blinks his way through the house. In the kitchen the hands are now reaching out of the pond to tap at his feet. The hand that beckoned before is now a hand and a wrist and it offers him a small pin with a flower on it. The other hands gesture and flick their lilies at it.

‘If I take that will you take me?’

The hands gesture _probably_.

‘Do I need it?’

 _Definitely_ the hands say.

He leans down and screws up his courage enough to reach forward. Fingers dance along his hand and press against his fingertips. They do nothing more. He grabs the pin and tucks it inside his jacket.

‘Uh, thanks, I guess.’

The hands make several rude gestures.

\-- 

Derek literally throws a handful of dirt in his face.

‘Thanks man.’

Derek smirks and goes back to painting the house.

Scott stands at a loss for a moment. Derek keeps painting with wilfully obliviousness.

‘Oi, wolfy, I want to call up some ghouls before dinner and I need your undead self.’ Lydia appears with another glass of amber between her fingers. She frowns at Scott. ‘Why are you still here?’

‘Insulting your presence, obviously.’ Derek snipes, walking past Lydia into the house.

‘Hmm. Adorable.’ She follows him and closes the door, the house blinking out between breathes and leaving Scott on the Hale property alone.

The walk into town from the Hale property is long but not arduous anymore. Lydia was rather insistent about clearing up his asthma and nothing builds a physique better than war and stress. It’s thirty minutes out from the property when the air stops feeling like Lydia has personally sprayed ever inch of it with her favourite perfume that he finds it.

There are marks in the trees. Triskele after triskele is pressed into the bark. The same one. He wonders how this wasn’t screaming at him every time he closed his eyes. Thinks of the moon drowning himself and Stiles. Maybe it was. The future doesn’t like precise metaphors, after all.

‘This looks like a problem.’ An old voice says.

He doesn’t turn. He’s getting sick of surprise visitors today. ‘What. No Shakespeare quote?’

‘Shouldn’t your other half be the one saying that? Sounds more like his thing.’ The same voice says.

‘It’s funny what you pick up from a person.’ He turns, and swings the bat, for humans it’s just a bat but he’s not all that sure about their humanity right now. ‘What’d you get from me, Allison?’

Allison smiles. Wide and open and silver in the moonlight.

‘Nothing important,’ she says.

A shot.

Things go dark. 


	3. Chapter 3

Eleven months ago Kate Argent and Derek Hale are murdered.

That one Scott can say is for sure his fault.

The basic process of events is this. Stiles is bitten, wins lacrosse, has Lydia notice him. Scott worries, nearly dies, meets Allison Argent. Scott and Stiles via process of elimination figure out that, hey, maybe the Argent name has something to do with it. Scott meets Chris meets Kate meets the barrel of a gun. Stiles meets Victoria finds Peter finds Derek. The history of the Argents and the Hales is spilled out all over the floor with wolfsbane bullets. Scott saves Derek. Derek is an asshole about it. Peter wraps his hands inside Stiles head and shakes the good out. Scott tries to be good for the both of them but he fucks up and Lydia nearly dies on the lacrosse field. Peter is killed and Derek is Alpha. Lydia Martin dies in the back of an ambulance. Lydia Martin is buried in the darkest, safest part of the forest Scott can find. He owes her that. Kate Argent is murdered but not before she puts a mouthful of wolfsbane and silver in Derek. Derek would die but Scott is stubborn about it. Derek does die but only because Stiles holds him down and does it himself. Scott buries him where he buried Lydia. Scott makes a deal and when he wakes up with eyes burning through past and future he doesn’t mourn the loss of colour in them at all. Isaac and Erica and Boyd are turned. As is Jackson but that one goes really wrong, really fast. Peter uses Stiles to come back. Stiles uses Jackson to get revenge on Peter. That goes really wrong too. Gerard Argent blows back into town and Stiles fails to kill him. Gerard calls down a war. Chris Argent is taken hostage and Victoria breaks ranks. Allison stays with her grandfather. On the third full moon of the war, four months from the beginning of this hell, Lydia drags herself and Derek back from death. It’s too little too late to save Jackson.

Danny dies.

His mother stops talking to him.

The sheriffs department is blown up.

The town whispers about _wolves_ and the true extent of the bad blood between the Argents and the Hales comes out.

A year and Allison is maybe a double agent and maybe still in love with Scott. The likelihood of either changes from moment to moment. He can be fairly sure that right now she’s not here to kiss him. She’s a little thinner and a little meaner around the mouth. She’s dressed in black and he thinks he can see three men on dirt bikes idling a few hundred metres away. They keep turning their lights on and off in an effort to be menacing. He’s not worried. The bat parts metal like water now.

‘Do you know what this is?’ She asks, her crossbow still pointed at his head. He makes himself hold the bat tighter. Her hair is shorter now and hits her cheekbones. He blinks slowly to give himself time.

‘Nope. Do you?’

She abruptly lowers her weapon. ‘Alpha pack. Trouble.’

‘Ah.’

‘Yes, Gerard thinks they’ll be here within the month. Sometime before the Hunters Moon.’

Scott shakes his head. Symbology, a werewolves favourite weapon apart from claws and teeth, ‘And you want to make me an offer I shouldn’t refuse.’

Her eyes widen a little, god she’s gorgeous, and she smiles properly for the first time in, he thinks, weeks. ‘You’re going to say yes to me sometime. You usually do.’

Usually is _used_ to and _yes_ isn’t a word he can afford to give right now.

Allison wants him to join her for the same reason, more or less, that Stiles does. Both of them a) love him b) thinks that’s a fucking excuse and c) think that he’s too heroic to keep on doing this. Scott is really not that stupid. When Victoria broke ranks he offered her a place to stay. When Erica and Boyd and Isaac ran he gave them somewhere too. He’s consolidating a power base but unlike Stiles and Allison he’s not doing it because he’s got the bad family head whispering into his ear. He’s doing it to help people and if his helping means everyone can’t just kill each other than he’s going to stand firm and pretend ignorance. Scott is well aware that it’s him and his stubbornness keeping this from tipping to one side. If he choose right now the war would be over before morning.

‘You heard about me meeting with Stiles?’ He ventures. Neither of them are enthused about him talking to the other. It would be funny if it wasn’t so horrible.

She scrunches up her nose. ‘It looks bad.’

‘It was unavoidable.’

‘I know what today is.’

‘And you couldn’t just give me it?’

She rolls back a little. Ducks her head a little to hide her mouth behind her hair, ‘I still love you.’

‘Yeah. I love you too.’ He says with as much sincerity as he can manage. This is why he’s not sure of her. She shows up and she tries to kill them all. She breaks into their homes and steals things. She double crosses him and then Gerard and then him again and says _I love you_ at the end. Scott thinks she’s playing her own game but for the life of him he can’t see what it is.

‘And it doesn’t mean much.’ She says sadly. The arrow goes back to being pointed at his head.

Boyd is still recovering from being set on fire. So. No. It doesn’t.

‘I have to ask, Scott.’ 

‘No.’

‘Okay. I’ll see you when I see you.’ She turns and walks away. The long line of her back betraying the guns and the knives and the thin silver rope around her neck. The rope is to protect her from his hands. The rope means he could touch her without worrying.

‘Is that it?’ He calls out.

‘Yes. That’s everything I have to say to you.’

He turns away too and when he looks back barely a minute later he can still see the moonlight glinting off the silver rope in the distance.

\--

Erica hands him some food and goes back to curling up on Boyds bed in the rec room. She’s got an ipad and she’s helping him watch a movie with her, hands clasped under the blanket. He can make out Boyd breathing deeply and straining to keep his eyes open. He’d only got the soft facial features back a couple nights ago. The skin is still darkening. Deaton said they’d have to move him to Lydia if he wasn’t well by the end of the month. It’s a logistical nightmare and would leave them two down in a fight. Scott has favours enough to cover their ass but he’d rather not call.

Isaac wraps a familiar hand in his hair and tugs him back.

‘Victoria.’ He says gravely.

‘Are you my answering machine now?’ Scott teases.

Isaac has an expression that would very much like to be inscrutable. The curls and the general demeanour of puppyhood mar it somewhat. ‘Something like that.’  

Victoria is alone in his room when he gets up there. She’s wearing all black but her feet are bare. He’s used to mildly threatening heels. He offers her some food before he sets it on the table. She declines with a shake of her head. Her hair is longer now but still the same shade of red.

‘You should clean in here.’ She says instead of hello.

‘Probably.’ He takes off his jacket and puts the bat by the door, ‘there’s something called an Alpha Pack coming.’

‘A group of blood thirsty animals that will destroy everything in their path,’ she says lightly, ‘what do you want to do about it?’

Must everyone be difficult today? ‘You’re my War General, you tell me.’

\--

Victoria showed up on his doorstep bleeding from one arm and glaring lightly at his doorway six hours after Chris was kidnapped. She’d come with a small armoury in her backseat, information about the Argents and a promise that she would topple every single last one of the bastards that allowed her husband to get captured. Scott had assumed it was unplanned or at least done with her permission.

When he pushes her on it the first time she says, ‘I do not enjoy coups,’ and leaves it at that.

The second time he pushes her on it adds another dimension of _really fucking wrong_ to the Argent-Hale feud.

She stays for six days the first time and spends her nights telling his mother as much as she can. Victoria says its protection and Scott can’t really disagree. As the sixth day blows into the seventh Victoria packs some bags and makes to leave. She says, ‘I’ve got some people to see. Melissa, move out of this house, it’s doing you no good. Scott, I like you but you’re going to get everyone killed if you don’t let some of that idealism go.’

That said, she closes and locks the door behind her, car streaking off into the distance.

‘You know. One day someone’s going to not do that to us.’ His mother says.

His mother moves them to a small apartment far into the bad side of town where the sheriff, back when he was the sheriff, used to keep people who needed protection. It smells damp and bloody. They’re there for three weeks before Victoria sends news. It’s not good. Peter is expanding his influence, using the Hale money to buy into businesses and property.

At the end of the month, when the apartment stops smelling like they’re waiting to die and starts feeling like they’ve got some hope, Chris Argent turns up at their door with the shit beaten out of him. Melissa cleans him up as best as she can but it’s not much. His wounds aren’t closing and he can see sticky residue on the skin. Peter painted him with medicine to make sure he was still bleeding when he got here.

‘Is there anything you think could help?’ His mother asks.

‘Yes.’ He turns away. Yes, but.

‘Then for the love of god, Scott, _help._ ’

‘Mom,’ he says as quietly as possible, ‘this is a trap.’

She nods her understanding, ‘maybe it is but we have to help him.’

‘Okay,’ and he can feel his eyes thump. Can feel whatever he made the deal for say _no._ He goes knowing that things will be in ruins when he comes back.

45 minutes to Deatons and back. That’s it, 45 minutes. But when he comes back Chris is gone and his mother is holding a gash wound on her palm. He drops the stuff, vials of ash and liquid spilling on the floor.

‘Mom!’

‘He looked the same. God, as the first time...I.’ She gives him her hand and cries. ‘Scott, Scott, Stiles too. _Stiles was here_. Why is this happening?’

Because Scott went the wrong way in the forest.

‘I’m so sorry.’ He says.

She doesn’t say it wasn’t his fault and he almost hates her for it.

He worries for months after that it’s the kind of hurt she won’t talk about. The kind that festers and breaks you from the inside out. He worries that maybe he’s going to get her killed.

Victoria comes back and his mother stops speaking to him except for when she has to. He still worries about her and she still probably worries about him but they’ve let a gap build up between them now and that doesn’t come undone so easily.

Victoria comes back and brings two women and one man with her the next time they meet. Two he’s seen in his head. The woman with the grey in her hair is the iron fisted matriarch of a sea born family in Mississippi. She stands at 5 nothing and has eyes the same shade as the water near her home. The other woman has hair the colour of sunshine and wheat. She has more freckles than he’s ever seen and flat green eyes. She’s from Kansas and she’s at least 30 years the other woman’s junior. The man is darker skinned than Boyd with a shock crop of bright pink hair. He says he’s from London with an accent Scott can’t even begin to understand. They all refuse to give names.

Mississippi specializes in the Jackson kind of mythical creature, things that turned out wrong and need to be made right. Kansas tells him she specializes in specific kinds of assassination. London says he’s here to make sure things go smoothly.

Scott leans back in his chair and says, ‘Right. No.’

Victoria blinks. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Your husband’s alive as of a week ago. You know that. Peter has just demonstrated that he knows how to find us. Stiles isn’t going to stop him from at least torturing people. You are not launching a half formed assassination plot.’

‘I don’t take orders from you.’

Scott rolls his eyes. ‘You scare the crap out of me. I’m not telling you to do anything ever.’ He gathers some courage, ‘but you’re here, I think, because you know that I’m the safest place to be. Allison and Stiles don’t want to hurt me if they can help it and you think I’m dumb enough about this stuff to not notice you running the shots.’

London smiles slightly and adds, ‘really Victoria?’

Victoria hums and taps her foot once, ‘I know how to do this.’

‘Look, I can’t stop you, not really, but can you wait? Peter’s not going to kill Chris soon and,’ he swallows audibly and looks for somewhere to rest his eyes that’s uncompromising. There used to be lines. ‘I want you to do it. Kill Peter. But it has to be done right or he’s just going to come back. He’s like a cockroach.’

‘So what do you want?’ Kansas says.

‘We’re at war.’ Scott says, making sure to look each of them in the eye, ‘and I want you to lead this side of it.’    

‘All your friends could die.’

‘I don’t think they will.’ Surely he would have seen _that._ ‘And, uh, I’m really running out of things to lose.’

‘Well then,’ Victoria says with a smile, ‘let’s get to war.’

\--

‘You asked me to do this for you,’ Victoria pulls apart strands of wolfsbane and drops them into the silver ink. The purple melts into the silver. Victoria is careful not to touch the ink.

‘I did.’ Scott says, sitting down at the table and picking up a thin brush made of Lydia’s hair. He dips the brush into the ink and traces thin lines over the tattoos. The skin splits open, even if he doesn’t feel it, and drinks it in. The silver runs through all his veins and he can feel it touching his bones. Lydia was right, he _is_ turbo charging them.

Victoria looks at the ink like she wants to drink it, ‘It’s almost time to launch an attack.’

She has no idea.

‘Scott,’ she says like a mother to her child, ‘we need to kill him soon. Before the Alpha’s arrive.’

‘No.’ he says tiredly. Killing Peter before they’ve figured out how he comes back will do nothing.

‘Why not?’ She says with irritation. ‘You can’t save them.’

‘Like you can’t save Allison?’ He’s not trying to be cruel, not really.

She falters, ‘I want to save my daughter, but I’m not sure there’s much left of _her._ ’

‘I know.’

He knows what Gerard is doing and saying. He sees it when he closes his eyes.

‘And if I lose her and I lose my husband then I’m going to ruin them all.’ She says simply. Victoria Argent would burn the whole world down if she thought it would make a difference. He can admire the dedication even if he can’t admire the inevitable result. She would probably think thats a weakness.

They think he’s holding out on pulling the pin on this because he’s idealistic, because he’s heroic. The last year has lead him to do a lot of reading. Mythology and science and philosophy, anything he thought might help. He’s not a natural at it but everything gets easier with dedication and practice. He’d gotten one thing, really, out of all of human myth and that’s that heroes aren’t heroes because they’re intrinsically _good._ Heroes are heroes because no one can stop them. Everyone thinks they’re doing the right thing. It’s the shitty part of human nature. And Scott hasn’t been sure since he tricked Kate Argent into dying, since he left Lydia alone with Stiles, since before the future and the past were interchangeable. For that long Scott hasn’t been sure that whatever part of him was _good_ hasn’t been slowly beaten and bled out of him by circumstance.

If history remembers this at all they’ll probably call Scott McCall a hero. He won’t be, not by the end, but he’ll be the only one going into this with good intentions.   

‘I know.’ And he can feel that thin line between him and this war fade out. ‘Call London and the others.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yeah. If Boyd is better by the end of the month we’ll do it.’

‘Kill Peter.’ She says slowly, making sure he means it.

For a split second he wants to laugh with the horror of this. It’s Stiles and Peter vs Allison and Gerard vs him and Victoria. The generals are children and the masterminds are old and jaded and everyone is going to _die._  

'Yeah,' _you'll go with good intentions,_ ‘Kill Peter.’

\--

_his head gives him a woman made of silver_

_who are you, he might ask_

_no one to worry about, she might answer, this will not end the way you hope, she might answer_

_the moon grows too big in the sky and flowers bloom under it_

_things will be as they are, she might answer_

_everything ends_

_in the distance he can hear howling_

_in the distance he can hear magic_

\--


	4. Chapter 4

Killing Peter won’t be the solution everyone wants it to be. Killing Peter will not stop Gerard. It will not unmake Stiles. It will not remake the Argents. It will not save Allison. It will not bring back Laura. Killing Peter will not let Lydia or Derek leave the forest. Killing Peter will not let him look his mother in the eye again.

Killing Peter Hale will make a dead body and that’s about it.

Scott is fairly sure he and Peter are the only ones who know this.

\--

Boyd doesn’t get better.

His vitals drop steadily and his skin is losing colour. Erica and Isaac take turns standing by his bedside and touching him. More than once he finds them both sitting on either side of his bed, hands pulling out as much sickness as they can take. Isaac, especially, is taking it hard.

‘I’ll take him after dark,’ Erica says from her usual position at the bottom of the bed. Her hair is perfectly curled and she’s wearing pyjamas that have seen better days. She has had the same lipstick smudged on her lips for days.

‘I’ll have to go with you.’ Scott says. 

‘I can’t let you,’ she frowns, ‘they’ll definitely chase us.’

‘I have a plan.’ He says with satisfaction. He really is getting better at thinking things through.

Erica rolls her eyes, ‘I’ll get him ready.’

One day, he thinks, everyone is just going to trust that he’s doing the right thing.

He pulls out his phone and calls Lydia. Derek answers on the third ring.

‘You’re moving Boyd.’ Derek says. In the background is the sound of low chanting and a washing machine. He can hear someone who is not Lydia laughing.

‘How’d you know?’

‘Lydia says, and I quote, ‘you are not the only one with eyes’.’ Derek’s smugness is evident, as is the pride. ‘She also says something about helping hands and flowers.’

Scott walks over to a nearby table and flips open a notebook, writes a reminder to look up what that flower means. ‘Oh, that.’

‘That, huh.’ Amusement. ‘We’ve got a room for Erica too. You have more company coming in from out of town, right?’

‘Lydia see that?’

‘No. But you’re barely keeping them out with three angry hunter trained werewolves. Also, you’re not that much of an idiot.’

‘Yeah. They’ll get here after dark.’ Even if they don’t, Stiles and Peter are going to have other stuff to worry about tonight. ‘We’ll probably get over to you at about midnight.’

Derek pauses, sighs, pauses again and makes a small disappointed noise. ‘You’re going to do it anyway.’

‘I’m out of options.’

‘I’m glad it wasn’t me.’ Scott stays silent. Derek continues after a moment. ‘That had to do this. I’m not good at being a leader.’

‘You’re a pretty good painter.’

‘I try.’

Derek hangs up.

Okay, so Derek still sucks sometimes.

\--

Anne Chanatry is the owner of small line of boutiques in New York. She is also Victoria’s only remaining family. Victoria’s viciousness is formed by years of hunting down and killing supernatural creatures, her ruthlessness was learnt at her mother’s knee.

Victoria and her mother have tea at 11am every day. They bake in the early morning and the soft smell of lemon lingers for hours after. On Sundays it’s expected for everyone to join them. Anne is by far the most terrifying woman Scott has ever shared Madeira cake with. Like usual Anne is sitting at table near one of the windows at the far end of the rec room from Boyd. Anne is tall and still well muscled in her 70’s. She’s silver haired and as always wearing a neat tweed suit. Scott approaches her with caution. This triples when he catches the pink-haired man sitting opposite her.

‘Anne.’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘London. You’re early.’

London smiles, ‘couldn’t miss this.’

‘Kansas and Mississippi?’

‘Kansas will be here by morning. Mississippi has her own problems. She’s sending this kid, Carlos something. Looks a little like you.’

Casual racism in the morning. Nice.

‘You know what they say about us Mexicans.’

‘What do they say?’

‘Generally nothing if they can help it.’ He says flatly.

London shrugs and gives a little nod. ‘Okay, so, we have some boundaries.’   

Erica comes back dressed, showered and with a few purple flowers in her leather clad hands.’

London smiles wide. ‘Hello Erica.’

‘London.’ She puts the wolfsbane on the table with a small nod to Anne. Scott’s going to have to watch that. In a perfect world Anne and Erica wouldn’t even be aware of each other. ‘He wants to talk to you.’

He looks to the side and yes, Boyd’s eyes are faintly red and staring right at him. Boyd nods and turns back to stare at the roof. This is a conversation Scott never wants to have if he can help it. Erica hits him in the shoulder and mouths _go_ at him.

‘Are you okay? What’s up?’ Scott sits at the bottom of the bed where Erica has been for days.

‘Go, Erica.’  Boyd says to the room at large. Erica tenses from where she’s crouched down talking to London. She stands up straight and starts to shake he head. Boyd growls low in his throat and suddenly she’s gone. Boyd turns back and fixes a sickened, slightly glazed over glare on him. ‘If they catch us, you kill me. I’m not going with either of them. I can’t do it again.’

Erica makes a low hurt sound from the doorway.

Boyd holds up a hand to stop whatever Scott was going to say. ‘Erica. _Leave_.’

When Boyd lowers his hand Scott says, ‘you’re kind of their Alpha. I can’t do that.’

‘I’m not asking you to. I’m _telling_ you to.’

‘Not my Alpha.’ He says petulantly.

Boyd rolls his eyes, ‘I see we’re 12 today.’

Scott smiles and sobers, ‘I will if I have to,’ and the way is paved with these kinds of decisions, ‘but I’m going to try every other option first.’

‘You’re a good man.’

No. Everyone else is just worse.

‘See if you’re still saying that in 12 hours. It’s not going to be easy.’

‘Keep them out for a few hours. Isaac will waste his whole day trying to take the pain away if I let him.’

‘We’ve got morphine.’

‘It’s low. I can’t ask your mother to do more.’

Coincidence, neither can Scott.

Boyd does manage a low level look of condemnation until Scott leaves; he’s taking Boyd’s stubborn determination as a sign of better things. If they can all just be hard headed and hard hearted enough maybe it’ll get them through.

He chats with London for a few minutes, general bullshit and a few mean comments about airport security. Anne indulges them with a small smile until she reaches the end of her cup of tea. She politely requests that London pour her another one and then equally as politely tells him to fuck off. London raises one eyebrow, says _grand dame_ in grandiose terms and leaves with a nod of bright pink hair. He winks at Scott over his shoulder.

Anne dabs her mouth daintily and places a muffin on a small plate. She picks up a few pieces of the wolfsbane Erica left and drops it into her tea. ‘Sit down, boy.’

Scott does.

Anne takes a slow sip of tea, ‘As you already know all Hunter families, while they may have a few people with varied talents, have a tendency towards specialisation. The Argents are the oldest continuous line –next to the Chanatry of course- and have over their many centuries of fighting taken a hard earned and undoubtedly bloody position at the front line. They are mercenaries and warlords. Do you know what the Chanatry family specialises in?’

Scott has an idea but he shakes his head, ‘no idea.’

‘Information. Extraction of information. Extraction in general. We are the spy masters and the cleaners. As such our paths have often crossed with the Argents. We have bled with them. We have marriedthem. We have _loved_ them.’ She pauses to cut her muffin in half, ‘I knew Gerard as a boy. A _dumb_ boy. I knew Kate as a young girl who didn’t know how not to listen. I knew Chris before and after his affair with the Peter boy. After Peter killed my second in commands son accidently and with major provocation hence why he’s not dead already, wolves do not react well to their kin being taken and in that respect we are the same. I was there when Chris met my daughter and fell in love with her. I was there when Allison opened her eyes. I was there, Mr McCall. I know who and what this people are better than you can dream to.’

Odd word choice.

She continues, ‘I do not know you and this Stillinski boy. I hear stories and I like the two of you even less. If I have to murder you both with my own hands I will. This is a pit of vipers, son, and I don’t think you have what it takes.’

He deliberately relaxes. ‘Okay. Anything else?’

Anne blinks. ‘If you leave town in the next few days I won’t chase you. You and your mother could leave.’

‘No we couldn’t.’ He stands and holds out a hand. Anne takes it. The tattoo itches under his skin and it feels like its growing teeth. Anne hisses and pulls back.

‘What is that?’

‘Protection. Against everything. Even you.’

‘You don’t know what you’ve got under your skin.’ Her eyes move over the lines with the same hunger Victoria has in her eyes when she looks at the ink. The devoted finding a miracle.

‘Does it really matter to you?’ He says with more coldness than he’s ever felt before. This is home. These are his people. He made this place safe with his own hands. Who the hell is Anne Chanatry to talk down to him here?    

‘Leave.’ She says with decades of war between her lips.

‘No.’ Scott says, voice cold and getting colder. It’s a weird sort of rush. He’s growing up all at once. The war will come; he’s let it in. All he can really do is let himself shake it off. Let this shake the good out of him the same way it did to Stiles and Allison and Kate and Derek and everyone who’s ever fallen under a moonlight and silver banner. That starts here. That starts with pushing back instead of coping with the stuff that’s shoved down his throat. Making ultimatums of his own.

‘I need you.’ he says slowly, ‘but I won’t be threatened and I won’t be intimidated. I won’t bend for the mistakes you witnessed, the ones you helped make,’ Anne bristles, ‘if the Chanatry family is full of spy masters and manipulators how come Gerard has you all twisted around his little finger? Our women are leaders, huh? How is that going for you?’

‘I’m your elder boy,’ _I’m your superior boy_ and he’s heard that tone before flowing just as cleanly off his father’s lips as whiskey and lies did. 

His hands clench. ‘Victoria is an Argent. She’s not your daughter anymore and she hasn’t been for awhile. You’re not here to help her; you’re here to make sure Gerard doesn’t gain any more influence than he already has. I know it’s a pit of vipers. I know I’m not good at this. But I am _not_ an idiot and I am not as easily swayed as you seem to be betting on.’

Anne stares at him, making a point of getting his eyes. Scott stares just as hard back.

‘Would you like another cup of tea,’ he says after the silence stretches uncomfortably.

Anne nods and he feels a little sick. She looks proud.

\--

The flower is Juniper.

\--

He goes to Lydia at twilight. The woods press back against his feet. Sonar. Lydia’s tracking him. He ends up sitting on a rock near the cliff. Lydia makes a point of stepping loudly.

‘You’re sure.’ She says. Her dress is long and red and flowing unnaturally around her. Her hair is the colour of her lips, her lips are the colour of someone’s heart.

He waves at her. ‘You’re a little overdressed.’

‘That’s just because you haven’t closed your eyes lately.’ She says snottily, ‘you should have come in a suit or some armour at least.’

‘Armour?’

‘At least.’ She says again.

Lydia holds his waist and takes him from the cliff to the Hale property in three steps.

He adjusts his clothes and the small silver pin on the inside of his collar. Lydia hums and stamps her foot. Between one blink and the next Lydis’a house appears and she whicks him inside.

Scott stops by the kitchen and the hands press up against a thin layer of ice now covering the water. Slowly more hands press against the glass in slow little circles until it melts away enough that one pair can sneak through. This pair is fond of him, maybe.

‘You know more than I do.’ He says to the hands.

They offer him garlic and scarlet geraniums and nightshade.

Lydia rolls her eyes. ‘They only ever give me Kennedia. Derek’s in the first room on the right upstairs.’

Lydia’s home is a labyrinth so when she gives instructions it’s in your best interest to do what she says exactly. Scott walks past the pentagram and around the shadow reading on the chaise lounge and around Laura and Natalie Hale sitting on the stairs. He walks and thinks very hard about the first room on the right. When he opens the door he finds a Native American woman with her hands on Dereks chest speaking very softly into his hair. Derek indicates to go back down. Scott would but the door seems to have left.

‘Close your eyes, then.’ Derek says as he does too.

His eyes are closed until Derek taps him on the shoulder, much too close and in his space.

‘You good?’ Scott asks.

‘It’s in the house.’ Before Scott can say anything Derek is turning down the stairs and he hurries to follow. He glances back and the woman is a swan.

Derek grunts. ‘Stop with the curiosity it only ever ends badly.’

Scott shrugs and keeps walking.

Derek makes him stand underneath in a room that smells like paint thinner while he reaches under the old and blackened stairs still in the middle of the house. Derek eventually pulls out a leather briefcase.

‘Is that a book?’

Derek makes a face. ‘No. why would I keep a book underneath the stairs?’

Why would you live in the literal burnt remains of your family?

‘Wanna come start a fight we probably can’t win?’

‘That’s why I got this.’ He opens the briefcase and produces a laptop.

Why would you keep a _laptop_ in the literal burnt remains of your family?  

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a bestiary.’

Wow. So many jokes. ‘Bestiality?’

‘No, Scott.’ Derek says like he’s offended, ‘that’s not-’

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s fine.’ Derek closes the briefcase and hands it to him, ‘we have better records than the Argents. The only people I can think of who might have better are the Salazars but that’s sort of their job.’

‘Salazar? Like the Harry Potter guy?’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Right,’ Scott says uncomfortably, ‘okay.’

‘Yeah.’ Derek’s face does something that might be amusement or a smile on a man who is not sitting in the place where everyone he loved died. ‘We should go.’

‘God, please, can we?’ Scott says under his breath.

\--

It’s 11pm in a small clearing. Scott and Derek ran out of conversation three hours ago.

Erica and London are circling around to the cliff to meet Lydia. They have Boyd. He and Derek spent four hours running obvious and semi-obvious trails. Whoever was sent to follow them will arrive soon. Scott looks over the symbols on the trees, triple checking their obviousness and hoping that none of the hunters or Stiles wolves bothered to pick up Finnish as a second language.

Derek bumps his shoulder and indicates a small distinctive light in the distance. Allison.

Shit.

Derek hits him again and indicates a spot some hundred meters away from Allison. There’s a familiar Blue shape.

Stiles

Double shit.

He feels sick. He feels lost. He feels empty. He shoves it behind a wall and scrambles into a large circle of mountain ash with Derek. He closes the circle and steps carefully into the shadow of a tree. Derek makes a noise and his eyes light up a tiny bit. A small light to see by.

‘We have to move if this going to work.’ Scott can hear himself say. ‘Up the tree.’

Derek all but throws him up it and climbs up after him.

‘Okay,’ Scott pulls out a small remote control. ‘Here we go.’

_Ass, titties, ass 'n titties  
Ass ass titties titties, ass 'n titties_

The stumped look on everyones faces would make a great picture.

‘Really, Scott?’

He rolls his eyes, ‘That’s not the point.’

There’s a rustling noise and then a series of heavy thumps.

‘What’s that?’

Thump.

‘The point.’

Thump.

Thump. __

_Big booty bitches thats where it gets  
Come on, hoe, let's go to the easy rest  
When I see ass, titties, ass 'n titties  
Ass, ass, titties, titties, ass 'n titties._

The creature is two metres tall easily, heavily scaled, with large wings spread out to twice its height. It’s green and slimy and if Lydia is the thing Scott regrets the most than the shocked, half knocked out gasp Stiles makes means this is his. The creature opens its jaw and hisses, drool and teeth spilling out.

‘What the hell is that?’ Derek whispers.

‘Jackson.’ Scott says. Deliberately loud. Stiles doesn’t turn but he knows he’s here now. He knows that Scott always knew. 

‘It has _wings._ ’

‘It’s not an _it._ It’s Jackson.’ Scott says irritated.

‘Fine. Why is he here?’

‘You wanna kill your uncle?’

Derek looks at him with old shadows. ‘It would be preferable if he just died.’

Yeah, he can understand that. ‘We need Jackson and we need a distraction to get Boyd to Lydia. I just doubled it up.’

‘How does this get us Jackson?’

‘We’re not saving him tonight,’ unfortunately, ‘but I need to see what he can do.’

‘Against Allison and Stiles.’

No. Not against them. They shouldn’t have been here. But the part where this could have been stopped just because someone he loved was in the way is long since over. __

_Ass, ass, ass, ass  
_ _  
_The music cuts off.

‘Jackson,’ Stiles says sadly.

‘Holy shit.’ One of the hunters Allison brought with him steps back too quickly. Jackson looks at him, pauses, considers.

Then all hell breaks loose.

Stiles wolfs out and Allison pulls out her crossbow. The hunters and the wolves both start firing shits. Scott’s glad they’re up in this tree. Scott looks all over Jackson trying to find what he’s looking for. He finds it between his scaled wings. Checks three more times to make sure. If he’s wrong now than everyone else is going to be screwed later. He’s as certain as he can be without actually touching it or getting Lydia to but they’re already in a precarious position.

‘Okay we gotta go.’ He grabs Derek’s hand, ‘right now, we gotta go.’

‘Aren’t we gonna do something about that?’ He gestures at Jackson who is currently beating the shit out of everyone.

No. Scott set it up so that Jackson would be lured here. The song was a distraction so that Stiles and Allison wouldn’t flee before Jackson got there. They’re fighting him to give him enough time to find out if he can actually do any of this as well as to get Boyd to Lydia’s. The motel is basically empty and while he’s sure the greater majority of both Gerard and Peter’s camp are combing the woods trying to find him they could also be burning his home down. Lingering might make him feel better but it won’t help anyone in the long run.

‘No.’ he says with finality, ‘we’re done. We’re going. They’ll be okay.’

Derek looks like he wants to say something. Scott half wishes he would. The irony might kill him. Derek lowers his head, intentionally submissive, and leads him back home.

\--

‘Well,’ Peter says from his perch in a tree, ‘that looks like a lost cause.’

A terrified noise from the dark.

‘I guess I’ll have to go with Plan B.’

\--

_there are striped carnations all over the floor_

_sorry, she says, sorry and sorry and sorry_

_the floor is covered in cyclamen_

_we can’t go back, he says, sorry, sorry_

_the floor is covered in judas tree_

\--

Scott opens his eyes again and finds himself in his own bed. There are hands on his chest and a silver rope around his neck.

‘You got out.’

‘You left me.’ She says.

‘You keep doing the same to me.’ He says and cups Allison with his hands. Lets one hand travel up and down her sides.

‘You have to stop coming here.’

‘I know.’ She says as she kisses him everywhere.

His hands tighten around her and he lets her take him apart and put him back together. She lets him do the same. The moonlight comes in through the window.

\--

‘Call them back.’ Stiles yells, face covered in blood and Peter’s claws half in his chest. ‘Right now, call them back.’

Peter twists his hand. Bones snap. ‘No.’

In the distance shots are fired.

‘We can’t,’ _do this, this is too far, we have gone too far_.

Peter leaves Stiles with his chest half un-done. With his heart pressing out into the cold air. He should die. He won’t. But he probably should.

‘Oh god. Oh god, what have I done?’

\--

Allison is heavy over his arms. The silver chain lies down her back, around her back, between her legs. The night is heavy and cold. Her back arches with her breathing. He traces lines from scar to scar.

He feels the breaking of the wards and waits. Waits until whoever is here to kill them all is within reach of his bat and his hands. He’s standing in front of the door holding the bat loose-fisted, breathing a little harder with the knowledge of a fight. He steps back and opens the door.

‘Stiles?’

Stiles shirt is torn and stuck to his body with thick dried blood. The scars on his face are still healing, so deep on one side his mouth is turned into a cruel little snarl. There’s a little bit of blood pumping out of a hole over the left side of his chest every other moment. There are occasional flashes of bone white and _how in the world_ did Stiles get here? He shouldn’t be able to move.

Stiles rubs his eyes tiredly, no gold or wolf in them tonight, ‘Peter said something about making the outside look like the inside should.’

His eyes are empty.


	5. Chapter 5

The news has a field day.

Six students dead and posed on the lacrosse field. No one saw it happen. The media thinks it’s a message from a new and deranged serial killer. One they think has been working in the Beacon Hills area for quite some time. Almost a year, in fact.

Scott can count the bodies and the parts that are missing and he can see where Peter did the work himself. He’s put them down and made them look peaceful. A redhead with a beautiful dress tossed this way and that, scars up her throat. A boy in a well fitting suit and the skins of snakes stuffed into his mouth. A brunette in silver with the sign of the archer carved onto her back. Another boy with a triskele stamped onto his mouth. A boy who had his eyes taken and put onto his hands.  It’s a message, alright.

‘I could rationalize it,’ Stiles hands rub over his head, his face, ‘it was fine if it was just us. _Our_ war. But they were just-’

‘Civilians.’ Allison says.

‘Children.’ Scott says.

‘I got them killed.’

Scott says nothing and Allison looks accusatory, because, well, Stiles _did_ get them killed.

‘How do I fix this,’ Stiles says to Scott. ‘How do I make this stop?’

Scott wonders if Stiles even remembers anymore what it was like before or if Peter is so far inside him now that even that light is drowned out. Does Allison ever feel warm all the way down or is she just as cold as the silver twined around her wrists. Do they miss it? 

‘You go back in time and you stop Kate from sleeping with Derek. You go back and stop the first hunter from killing the first werewolf. You go back to the beginning of time and stop the first person from figuring out how to take a life.’ Scott pauses, ‘you _stop doing this._ ’

Stiles won’t look him in the eye. ‘It’s not my fault.’

‘It _is._ ’ Scott says furiously, ‘this is your fault. You don’t get to ignore it until it goes away. You get to cope with your bad decisions like the rest of us.’

‘How do we kill him?’ Allison says sharply.

‘Who says we’re going to do that?’ Stiles slumps against the wall. He doesn’t mean it. If there’s one thing they all agree on right now it’s that Peter isn’t going to be corporeal for much longer. ‘He always comes back, anyway.’

Scott pulls on his gloves and gets them all a glass of water. It’s domestic, which is nice. He ends up curled up on his bed with Allison tense and battle ready next to him. ‘How?’

‘Next verse same as the last,’ Stiles says, ‘you burn him. You burn him until it sticks. Our bodies grow over every six months, cells, hair, everything except bone.’ Stiles eyes are hard and jealous of the tiny space between Allison and Scott. Stiles has his bones, Scott thinks, there’s a part of Stiles Scott isn’t going to be able to dig out no matter how many times everything grows over. ‘I know how to keep him in the ground until it all grows back again.’

‘Six months,’ Allison stands and starts pulling on her clothes, ‘we’ve got that long to put Peter down for good and to defeat the Alpha pack.’

‘Alliance?’ Stiles asks with a quirk of his mouth, the scars are still healing but Scott thinks it looks less cruel.

‘You have my father.’

‘Not _me,_ you’re smarter than that.’ Stiles rolls his eyes. ‘Peter has your father and he can leave whenever he wants.’

They stare at Stiles.

‘I thought you knew.’ Stiles says softly, ‘Chris isn’t- He’s very convincing, Peter, stronger have broken faster.’

‘My mother.’ Allison says, ‘she can’t-’

She _doesn’t,_ otherwise this would have ended much faster.

Stiles shrugs. ‘They saw them, the ones you guys have watching us all time. I know they did. I made sure they did.’

Allison punches Stiles as square on the nose as she can manage but everyone expected that. ‘You _son of a bitch. Who?_ ’

‘There was a man with pink hair, he winked at me. You should invest in different bikes, Allison, they’re _really_ loud.’

London.

‘Huh,’ Scott says, ‘well that explains a lot.’

‘What does?’ Stiles and Allison say at the same time.

Scott rolls his eyes, because really? ‘Why would I tell you?’

He’d been puzzling over why Anne wanted him out of the way as opposed to a martyr figure or just plain dead but if she knows that Chris has gone native she knows that Victoria will lose what’s left of her. In a perfect world Anna would be holding the information back to protect her daughter. This is a world with werewolves. She’s doing it for leverage. If Scott dies Stiles and Allison will kill whoever did it. There’s no guarantee the separation that’s kept all their secrets and plans from falling apart wouldn’t crumble. It would take three words to kill Victoria and if Scott’s _dead_ then Victoria could hear them anywhere. 

That London is working with both Anne and Gerard is even less of a surprise.

‘Alliance.’ Allison says.

Stiles closes his eyes, the gold bleeding back in. ‘Yes.’

\--

_the silver woman is there again_

_she says, ‘it will burn’_

_he says, ‘we set the fire’_

_no, she doesn’t mean that, she means the world ends in_

_fire and ice and_

_dead hearts_

_and who is he to get in the way and say it’s a sometimes_

_instead of an always_

\--

Allison and Stiles are still on his bed when he goes down for breakfast. They’ll be gone before he’s back, hopefully. Maybe this isn’t a double cross. He can’t bet on that though.London is sitting with a cup of coffee talking to a kid with these weird gloves on him. They make his eyes water. London spots him and waves him over. __

‘This is Carlos,’ Carlos waves a hand, Scott nods at him, ‘Carlos this is Scott. I imagine you’ll be working together closely.’

‘Not too close.’ Carlos says brightly.

‘You don’t sound like you’re from Mississippi.’ 

‘No, just back from this big mess in Chicago. I’m only here because I owe someone I’d really rather not some favours. I’m based out of LA, actually.’ Carlos looks him up and down, ‘never go to Chicago.’

Scott smiles, slightly. ‘I don’t really have the time.’

Carlos nods a little and goes off to do his own thing.

‘How’s things Scott?’

God, he is not cut out for this, ‘okay, you?’

‘Good enough.’ London leans forward, ‘you’re a shitty liar. I’m surprised everyone hasn’t caught on to your late night revelations.’ He raises an eyebrow suggestively.

‘Everything gets easier with practice,’ Scott says tightly, ‘things change.’

London puts down his cup and lets out a long heavy sigh. Scott looks at his scarred up hands and wonders just how many times he’s used them to hurt someone. ‘You should stop threatening people. I could be on your side.’

‘You have a side?’

His face scrunches up into actual anger. ‘Maybe you should talk louder and let everyone know.’

London isn’t working for Anne then. And if he’s not working for Anne it’s unlikely he’s working for Gerard. The only difference in their ideologies is who happens to be in charge.

‘Thanks.’

London looks confused. ‘For what?’

‘Lying.’ Scott says and then gets the fuck out of there before anything can pop and ruin his exit.

\--

Allison is gone but Stiles is in his shower. No one else is in the motel so Scott lets him stay in there long past when he should kick him out. Scott puts food on the table for whenever he’s done and sets about sorting herbs to take out to Lydia. He mass orders the few she can’t find or grow herself. Maybe this time he’ll make Derek come here instead of going out to her, it’s probably time he left the forest.

Stiles comes out with a towel tossed precariously around his hips. ‘For Lydia?’

‘Yep.’ He puts the dried roses into their own separate bag; Lydia says nothing kills like roses, ‘I’m getting Derek to do the pick up so you’ll have to be long gone.’

‘Why does Derek come here?’ Stiles pulls on his clothes and sits down to eat. He looks at the sandwiches, the biscuit and the apple. Does he think Scott poisoned it? Finally he lifts the apple, sniffs it and starts tossing it around in the air.

‘We’re friends.’

‘Friends.’ Stiles says emotionless. Did he really think that Scott wouldn’t try to move on? That he’d never try to reach out to anyone else?

‘Yes.’

‘I thought that was my job.’

‘Yeah, well, one of us jumped off the morality train at serial murder station.’

‘You sound like me sometimes, you sound mean like I do.’ Stiles muses, cut pieces of his apple and eating them.

‘No. I’m still kinder than you.’ He says, ‘Allison too, actually, I don’t have-’ Well, no, he does have the _capacity_ for it. He doesn’t have nearly the opportunity or the drive. ‘I thought it would help. You and Allison, you’re –thought if I was. It hasn’t helped, anyway. Doesn’t fit on me the same way.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Stiles says and means it.

‘But just for me.’

‘I only ever cared about you and my father.’

And there’s the great truth of it. Stiles has never given two fucks about people who didn’t give it back and the only people who gave it back are his father and Scott. ‘I know.’

‘Good. That’s not changing.’

‘How is your dad?’

‘Your mom hasn’t said?’

‘We don’t talk as much as we should.’

There’s a moment of poignant silence.

‘I know how that feels.’

Stiles leaves. For the first time Scott doesn’t miss him even a little.

\--

It’s late at night. His phone rings. He thinks long and hard about ignoring it.

He looks at the number and groans. ‘Derek, what’s wrong.’

‘Lydia.’ Derek hangs up.

Scott swears as he gets into his pants and goes into the forest. It takes him far longer than he wants to get to Lydia’s. The lights are out. There’s no noise. When he steps closer to the front door the house creaks ominously. Just in case his life wasn’t already enough like a horror film.

‘Lydia?’ He calls. ‘Are you home?’

And if you’re not can you let me in anyway?

‘Come in.’ A tired worn out voice says. The door swings open and he walks quietly in. In the dark the bottles light up. There are still liquid in them but the moonlight makes it harder to tell the colours apart. The pentagram in the living room is still as bright a blue as it is in the day time. Inside the pentagram is Lydia. She’s bound by thick vines with teeth. The vines move occasionally, alive and pressing her together. She’s not crying but she looks like she wants to. Her hair is cut short and ragged around her face. She looks as terrible as she did in the back of that ambulance and this has Peter all over it.

‘Oh, Lydia.’

‘He will not ruin me.’ Her voice is soft.

‘What is this?’

‘A binding, those dead kids were part of a ritual, he just made it look like something else’ she says, the house quivers, ‘unfortunately for him the forest is uninterested in doing anything other than eating him at the moment. I’ll be free by morning.’

‘Then why?’

She moves her head back as a particularly vicious vine wraps around her throat. ‘It’ll break the borders; it’ll let the alpha pack in.’

She won’t look him in the eyes.

‘Everything’s going to be fine.’ He says. Moving forward, she shakes her head.

‘Of course it fucking is. I’m going to wring that bastard’s neck myself. You’re staying here. I don’t much like you being in the forest without me usually, let alone when I’m bound to a tree.’ The tree in question squeezes her ankles and she hisses at it. ‘Derek’s gone out with his zombie family to patrol. Make yourself at home and don’t talk to me when I’m chanting. Also, stop talking to the hands, they’re getting ideas.’

Scott sits for a few moments. There’s water welling at the edges of Lydia’s eyes. She’s still human under all of it and it shouldn’t be so easy to forget that.

‘Why are you still here?’ She says and her voice breaks on _still._ He leaves because staying will hurt her more.

\--

He ends up stealing a beer from Derek and a guitar from the shadow in the corner and strumming a song for the hands in the kitchen.

They seem unenthusiastic about it until he starts singing too. The hands making splashing noises in time with the chords and when he reaches the end of the song they make noise for an encore. He gives it to them again and again until his voice is gone and sunrise is hot on the horizon. The hands clap for him again when he leaves and he has to wonder how it got to the point that the one thing left buoying him up without wanting something in return are the hands that pull people into the dark.

\--

Lydia is free in the morning and throwing magic around like confetti. Her hair is cut short, near chin length, curling slightly at the ends. She’s got a stainless steel pot and a strainer on the stove. Occasionally she stops chanting long enough to swear and throw in more ingredients.   

She doesn’t even look at him. ‘Go talk to Boyd. Third room second corridor. Interrupt his physio and die.’

He walks slowly, dragging his steps. He only picks up his pace when the house actually starts bumping against his heels. When he does get there Boyd is sitting in bed, all the colour back in him and throwing around a bean bag between his hands.

‘Tell me I can put this down.’ Boyd says.

‘Sorry, no dice.’

Boyd drops the bean bag anyway. ‘So.’

‘So,’ he says back, ‘we’re in an alliance with Allison and Stiles to kill Peter and defeat the Alpha pack. The Alpha pack will be here within the next few days so we’ll have to kill Peter soon.’ He tells the rest as quietly as possible.

Boyd listens and then lets the silence roll over. This is why Scott likes him, he thinks before he makes decisions. Eventually he says, ‘they’re my wolves not yours.’

Scott’s eyes widen, ‘I wasn’t assuming anything else.’

‘You were,’ Boyd shrugs, ‘I wouldn’t expect you not to. We’re not dying for your girl friend or your best friend. So we’ll fight the Alpha pack and you can do the rest on your own.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Never did like London.’

‘I think that’s sort of the point.’

‘Take Erica back with you. She’s making Derek sexual uncomfortable and it stopped being funny a few days ago. The exit is the fifth door on this corridor, a left, a right, left, left, sixth door.’ Boyd pauses and raises an eyebrow, ‘want me to write it down.’

‘No we’re good.’

He almost gets lost but a woman that looks remarkably like Stiles mother turns him away when he walks a corridor too far. He doesn’t acknowledge her beyond a nod. Safer that way.

Lydia is still furious when he gets back to her.

‘Erica left already.’ She throws more lilies into the pot.

‘I’ve got your flower order.’

‘Excellent. Did they have everything I asked for or just the common stuff.’

‘Even the specific kind of morningbride?’

‘Yes,’ Scott places a hand on her shoulder. She doesn’t shrug it off. ‘We can save him.’

‘Saving Jackson, Killing Peter. You’re getting to be a regular mastermind.’

‘How did you know about Peter?’

‘The walls have ears.’ She says sardonically.

Huh, that could be awkward. He looks for a way to change the subject. There’s a new plant climbing up around the kitchen. ‘So, uh, what’s this?’

Lydia shrugs. ‘No idea, some weed Derek brought in.’

Virginia Creeper, actually, which is-

‘Oh,’ Scott says. Well, that’s actually true to form.

‘What?’ Lydia slams the knife down.

‘Nothing.’ He bites down on his lip. Jesus. This is _adorable._ ‘I guess Derek’s not around.’

‘No.’ She says shortly.

‘I’ll go then.’

‘Yes, _fine._ ’ Lydia throws some plant into the pot and the entire thing turns a shiny pink. ‘I do not want a love potion.’

‘Are you sure?’ The Virginia Creeper looks _very_ healthy. It’s nice to know that no matter what Scott has done or will do to get a girl to notice him, it is not this.

‘Do I look like the sort of girl who needs magic to make someone do what she wants,’ Scott tries to answer, ‘the answer to that question is always and forever _no,_ Scott.’

‘Right.’ He says, throwing a conspiring look at the hands. They give him the finger.

He finds a few books on flower meanings pointedly left by the door. 

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and [here](http://www.mediafire.com/?29h8df1ywip49t4) is a playlist.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In chapter warning for serious horror themes.

The Alpha pack leaves signs throughout the town.

A homeless woman is murdered and a _mountain lion_ is left over her corpse. They play chase with Derek and his family, weaving scent trails and laying traps. They stake out the place where Scott used to go to leave messages for Chris. They leave a ring of blood and wolfsbane around the vets’ office. Scott’s sure they’ve visited the motel. The silver in his hands is running hot all the time. After a year of putting it off the battle is finally catching up. He’s ready and that alone is terrifying. It’s the preliminaries right now, scouting and making small moves into enemy territory. The match hasn’t been set yet but everyone knows it’s a matter of _when._

Beacon Hills has quieted down in the last week. Allison says they sent out a memo to everyone telling them to get out if they can. Scott and Stiles have done the same. To everyone but Scott’s surprise Stiles set up a safe passage through Peter’s territory, outlining and strictly maintaining security and safety for anyone who wants to leave. Scott’s opened up the motel for temporary accommodation. It’s the most heavily fortified place left inside the town limits. Going from a population of not very much to barely anything at all is taking some adjustment.   

It’s Allison and Scott tonight, trawling through town on her bike looking for hideouts and any obvious aggressive plays. There’s the usual rank stench of fear and distrust that blankets the town nowadays. The sharp feeling between your shoulders that you can’t just quite relax. Allison has her gun in her hand already, she’s taking no chances.

The ink in his hands is singing so hot and fast it feels like he’s burning up. They’ve just crossed into the more expensive part of town. With it’s well maintained lawns and security systems. They were the first to clear out. They pass Jackson’s house and pause on the far end of the street.

‘What are we going to do about him?’ Allison asks with a tone suggesting she expects no real answer.

‘I can’t tell you.’ He replies.

She nods and they move on, past Isaacs long since abandoned home. There’s a sharp pain in his wrist and he tells them to turn three streets down and toward the preschool. He can feel Allison get tenser as they approach. There’s no need to come here, not at night. From a few houses away he can see a long bright column burning by itself. Orange and red reaching toward the sky. There is broken glass throwing eerie light all over the playground and up the steps to the school. Allison parks the bike and steps off walking with brisk efficiency and her gun raised. Scott knows there’s no one else around, would have felt it. Allison probably knows that too but he’s got the feeling she needs that gun up to keep walking. She slows and the inevitability of what comes next settles low in the pit of his gut.

All over the playground and all over the outer walls are stickers and paintings and small bright, bright yellow paste on bumblebees. Thick gooey mass runs in drips, sticking everything together. There are drag marks, like someone has run their fingers over it. This is most horrific perversion of innocence Scott has ever seen. Allison shakily mutters under her breath but he can’t make it out. All he can see is the path devoid of blood and gore and mess, the path the fucking _monster_ wants them to follow. Allison steps first because she is much, much braver and much angrier. Scott follows half a step behind _forcing_ himself to look at everything, to remember what he’s going to fight for. Things add up wrong, it’s contained; it’s violent but controlled, not an animal out of control.  

There’s too much blood and not enough of it at the same time.

They push open a side door and the long drag it takes to open tells them everything they need to know. Inside is indescribable. He’ll see it for the rest of his life but he’ll never know how to describe the sound, the smell, the way the taste of it clogs up under his nose and refuses to leave. There is horror, there is grotesque, and then there is the tragedy of the scene in front of him.  

‘Oh fuck.’ Allison turns and vomits quietly, hand reaching out for him as she heaves and gags. ‘This is it then.’

‘Yeah,’ he tucks his fingers in hers and looks away from the horror. ‘This is all there is.’

\--

Allison and Stiles stay the night. No one says a word when they all pile in together.

There is no moon.

\--

London comes calling with a gift. A small stylized dove and olive branch as well as a copy of an old bestiary in Norwegian. There is no one else in the rec room. No one else in the motel. He’s probably set himself up from something unpleasant.

‘An olive branch?’ He says with a wide smile that comes nowhere near his eyes.

‘Oh?’ Scott says quietly.  

‘I’m not working against you,’ London lays himself down on the chair like Scott thinking that is burden, ‘we’re even going in the same direction to a point.’

‘What point is that?’

‘Not a lot of people are happy with the way this community is going.’

‘And you think letting a bunch of kids fight a war they don’t understand will fix it.’

London steeples his fingers and tilts his head. ‘It’s the way most of history works.’

‘So it is,’ Scott leans back and lets his posture fall open, he’s not here to play games, ‘what are you going to tell me?’

‘You’ve been interrogated enough times to know it doesn’t work like that.’

‘You’re only going to tell me what you want to tell me no matter how sneaky I am.’

‘Catching on.’

Scott laughs genuinely. ‘Nah, man, it’s just in a lot of movies.’

London arches and eyebrow. ‘Movies.’  

‘Yeah, like, every Bond film ever.’

Now he smiles. ‘Am I James Bond now?’

Scott shrugs.

‘You’re really something kid.’ London smiles wider, ‘I used to think there was honour in this. I can’t be so sure now.’

Scott thinks of the small sad bumblebees stuck to the walls with blood, Allison’s fingers in his, the finality of turning away from the gore.

‘How could you have ever been sure?’ Scott asks voice cracking on _ever_.

It takes London a long time to answer. Words coming to his face and then fading away again. ‘Things change.’

‘Things can’t change that much.’

‘There is more in heaven and earth, there is more in the pits of hell, there is more in each and every day. You wouldn’t say you’re a good man. I wouldn’t agree with you if you did. I’m sure you used to believe in the good thing too. I, uh, I didn’t learn that good and not good were just different shades until it was too late to unlearn it. knowing what you do now is a blessing. If you never expect the honourable thing to happen you can’t be disappointed when it doesn’t.’

Scott takes a deep breath. Tries to think of something to say other than _fuck you,_ ‘That is such utter bullshit.’

‘You think it makes you broken.’ London says archly.

‘I know it does,’ Scott hisses. ‘I can’t even buy a legal drink and I am going to die.’

‘Maybe,’ London says enigmatically, ‘maybe not.’

\--

_all the stars fall from the sky_

_all the stars are you, the lady in silver says_

_all the falls are yours, a new man, dressed in the head of a deer and holding a yellow bumblebee_

_this will not end softly, a third voice, him own at age five, age ten, aged back one year_

_they all nod at each other and say_

welcome to the war; enjoy your stay

\--

Derek comes to pick up some flowers and Scott takes the trip back with him. Scott doesn’t say anything to him, can’t knowing what he does about what comes next. Derek huffs and makes faces when he takes the flowers off Scott, like Scott is just plain baffling.

Scott walks slowly through the house taking in the details with new eyes. The shadows obey no law. The house is always spotless. The bottles along the walls have faces and names and entire lives. Eventually he comes to the kitchen and the hands slapping the water in hello. He nods absently. The hands get more insistent. He ignores them. There is a new whiteboard in the kitchen and a conversation scrawled across it.

_‘Pain demands to be felt.’_ Blunt and elegant strokes, Derek if he’s guessing.

_‘You haven’t even read that book. Also, make me cake.’_ Says curved handwriting obviously meant to represent Lydia.

_‘No.’_

_‘Cake and The Notebook. This is not a democracy.’_

_‘No.’_

_‘Cake, The Notebook and all my delicates to the dry cleaners. Do you want to try for a slam dunk, sweetie?’_

Then-

_‘Scott I know you’re reading this.’_

‘Lydia,’ he hisses. She walks in the back door a moment later, the wind smelling of a city that is far too noisy to be Beacon Hills. Scott makes the closest approximation he has to a pout. Lydia simply makes her favourite bitchy expression and starts pulling off her jacket. When she has fussed with her clothing and general appearance long enough to grow irritating she turns dramatically, says, ‘My bedroom is full of lichen and the stench of brooding Scott. You should fix that.’

Scott looks at her. Eyes a few shades too bright to be natural, red hair pulling in a wind he can’t feel, her deep blue dress pulling around her knees and her collarbones sharp.

‘Jackson.’ He says and watches the colour fade from her cheeks.

‘So.’ She says with deliberate mystery. ‘It’s time.’

‘Past it, I think.’

‘What happened?’

‘I made a mistake.’ And that’s a really tiny fucking word for it. ‘Well, I made a lot of mistakes. Derek was the Alpha just long enough to turn Erica, Isaac and Boyd. Jackson went after him and-’ he pauses and holds his head together. There’s so much about what happened he’s made himself forget just to keep functioning. He has to tell her. She should have always known.

‘And?’

‘Stiles isn’t,’ he pauses, swallows the bile in his throat, ‘he _wasn’t_ a bad person. He couldn’t kill Derek, not outright. He, uh, he made this elaborate plan, played this _game_ hoping he could trick the Argents into hunting him down so he could just slip in and kill him quietly. He’d trapped Derek in the old Hale house slowly dying from poison and he started to run the Argents off. And then Jackson turned up.’

Lydia closes her eyes.

‘Derek almost killed him. Bite him to change him. But it didn’t change him. Not the way we thought.’

‘I saw him through Derek’s eyes.’ Lydia blinks too wet to be unaffected. ‘Derek bit him.’

‘It’s not his fault.’ Scott says insistently. ‘It’s not. Don’t ever let him know you thought that.’

Lydia would let it fester; let her resentment of Derek grow until it was just as much a living thing as he was. Constantly a step out of focus. It would be so very unkind to make him live with that. It would be unkind to make him live as an inescapable focal point of Lydia’s hate. It would be even more corroding now that the Virginia Creeper is twining the walls, healthy and strong.

Lydia looks guiltily at the plant, switching back to anger as her gaze rests on him again. ‘What next?’

‘Stiles called me and I...helped him. It wasn’t like it is now. You were still dead.’ He remembers the panicked phone call, how he’d thought that maybe Stiles had come back. Maybe things had changed.

‘God, Scott.’

‘I didn’t know, I still thought I could fix it and save everyone. Jackson got sicker and sicker. He grew a tail and then wings and he,’ his thumb plays with the edge of the Juniper charm the hands have him, eyes looking for anywhere to rest that won’t stare back accusingly, ‘we needed to put him down.’

‘Stiles.’

And this is it, isn’t it? ‘Me.’ He says with as much finality as possible, _I did it, it was me._ ‘So Stiles took him out into the forest and I thought that would be the end of it. Then a week later, on the full moon, Jackson visited me in a vision. He was human in form if not mind. He told me how to kill him. Strange, I thought, when you’re already dead. So I went looking and came to a small waterlogged grove with spells that only you and Stiles know and Jackson lying in the stagnant water, body twisted into the bank. I couldn’t get him out. Could only hear him begging to just fucking drown already and I-’ he wipes his hand down his face repeatedly, the motion getting jerkier and more desperate each time. ‘I left him there and I never told anyone. I started to fight against Stiles and Peter actively, I tried to find a way to make up for not saving him and I’m terrified I can’t.’

The air is quiet and still. All the words still hanging in the air. He can’t take them back now and that is not as comforting as it should be.

‘That’s not enough.’ Lydia whispers.

‘I know.’

‘ _It’s not enough,_ Scott. Jackson deserved a lot of things but this is not one of them.’ Her eyes are huge in her face, shiny.

‘I need your help.’ He says pitifully. ‘There’s a way to...’

‘Kill him.’

His shock registers on an atomic level, the reality of what he’s asking crawling up his spine and nesting. ‘I am so sorry.’

She’s already speaking over him. ‘What do you need?’

‘Derek.’ He flinches when she screams, just once, high and frustrated.

‘If you take him away from me too Scott so help _all of you-_ ’

Fuck, she’ll never forgive him, he won’t forgive himself. ‘He needs to go to where Jackson was and he needs to stay until Jackson is dead. There’s a spell we can use to bind their minds together, let Derek have control. If it helps the spell might kill me too.’

Her face makes it very, very clear that it does. ‘And after.’

‘Derek will let Jackson drown.’

‘You can’t ask me to do this.’

He shouldn’t, _can’t_ left the second he and Allison opened the door of that pre-school.

‘I have to. You heard.’

‘What do I care about that, _what do I care about the living?_ ’ The house whips up and the forest darkens. The hands in the water disappear and in their place are the sounds of heavy hooves and rising waves. The water curls around him with intent to harm. He’s prepared for the pain. He closes his eyes. Lydia makes a noise of complete fury. He meets her wild eyes bare inches from his through a thin silver barrier. He pats down his body and finds the little pin the hands had given him ice cold to the touch.

‘Show me,’ she doesn’t get any calmer but the utter threat of the situation dies down, ‘show me what you saw, show me what it looked like, I need to understand what you’re asking me for.’

He does.

Whatever fucking thing looks down from above help him, he lays that terror in someone else’s eyes.

Lydia cries and cries into his shoulder and his own face is not at all dry.

\--

War makes strange bedfellows of morals and ethics.

Morally speaking it’s wrong to take the twisted and damaged mind of a boy you’ve known since you were seven and make him kill a man.

Ethically speaking what’s one life against the sea of horror and blood Peter will let loose if he isn’t stopped.

Scott doesn’t sleep, doesn’t dream, doesn’t see a fucking thing.  

\--

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [playlist part twoooooo](http://www.mediafire.com/file/p5eum5r9z21sdmz/rrd_pt_2.zip)

**Author's Note:**

> Basically. I have a huge 'What If Stiles was turned and basically reacted to it like an emotionally stunted teenage boy suddenly gifted with lycanthropy would.' Throw in some Peter and some Scott is a seer and mix with my propensity for huge story lines and mythology, simmer for three weeks and you have this.
> 
> tl;dr - if i don't post this now I probably won't at all.


End file.
